Digital Writing Portfolio

Let’s begin with a claim: teaching and learning without reflecting on how, what, and why we are teaching and learning is meaningless. In First Year Writing, we believe that a digital writing portfolio is the best platform — like a dot-connecting mechanism — for supporting your reflections.

Reflection refers to the iterative process that we engage in when we want to look back at some activity or decision we’ve made, to think about what we’ve learned from it, and how we might use it in the future. Reflection is a powerful tool in teaching and learning — think of it as a dot-connecting mechanism — and outside of academics, reflecting is a common tool among professionals and organizations as a way to establish values, goals, and future actions:

What did I do? What is significant about it?

Did I meet my goals?

When have I done this kind of work before? Where could I use this again?

Do I see any patterns or relationships in what I did?

How well did I do? What worked? What do I need to improve?

What should I do next? What’s my plan?

Portfolio requirements

Your WRD104 Digital Writing Portfolio—for which I have provided you with a template model—consists of three sections:

A dialogic reflection on our course — the offer

A process description of your Contextual Analysis project, in which you describe not only what should have happened in that project, but what actually did happen

A work showcase of final drafts, with your reflection on your writing process and how you engaged the course goals: challenging yourself with perplexity, thinking, and critical thinking